28 July 2015

You can use a folding
paste-table like the one in the drawing above, and set it up in the street, or
in a mall, or in a hall at an event or a conference or meeting. Or you can use any
other kind of table, for that matter, to create what is called in a general
way, a “stall”.

It is as well to think of the
purpose of your stall as being to serve the cause, rather than to have an
objective of making a big lump of money. Of course you must pass any surplus to
your Treasurer, and you must account in some satisfactory way to your Treasurer
for all the receipts and payments of funds, and for the stock of goods, which
must also be properly conserved. You should, as with all Party or mass-movement
activities, strive to generate a surplus, and not to carry debts back into the
organisation.

It should be your intention
to put on a good show, and to give a good experience to anyone who might come
to your stall. You should therefore try to become aware of what such people
might expect to find. Experience will in due course make you aware of what this
is. People will in fact tell you what they want.

Paste Table

They may want to make a cash
contribution to the Party, and you should be open to that, and ready to process
it, with a receipt book, for example. They may want to join the party, so you
should have application forms and be ready to follow a correct and effective
procedure.

People may want current
literature of the SACP, ANC or Trade Union, such as its Constitution, or documents
like the South African Road to Socialism, the Branch Manual and the Election
Manifestos of the ANC, and even documents like the National Development Plan or
the Constitution of South Africa. You will not be able to keep all of these,
but you may be able to bring some of them. A good principle is to bring
whatever you can get of such things to your stall.

Not everything on the stall
will have a cover price or a tariff price, but you can ask for donations.

Clothing and merchandise has
been mentioned in the previous item. As we have said, the main thing is not to
lose money, but to give a political experience to the masses, and to do
whatever business may be appropriate to the political aims of the organisation.

Standing behind your stall,
you become the public face of your organisation. You become a public
representative of what your organisation stands for.

As such it becomes clear that
what you are doing is no more or less than Agitprop. You do it with different
means, but the aim is the same. It is part of the mission to educate, organise
and mobilise.

Finally, this relates back to
what was said in the beginning of this part, about the Party legalising itself.
The open, public relationship that the SACP has with the South African public
is deliberately kept up by all these means, and including stalls of the kind
described here.